Sumptuary laws were a regular concern for many mercantile communities and remained a concern in varieties of ways over centuries. In Venice there were reasons the city leaders did not want ostentatious displays of wealth in such a close packed city. Not even in clothing, jewelery, or, for silver, even served at table for official dinners or parties. The sight of wealth could turn good men into bad. The show of a gift could elicit responses that made people or, some people felt, could lead people to do terrible things. A sign of wealth could serve as a taunt, as a goad toward jealousy, even anger, pricking the good conscience away from humility or servitude, obedience. Economic crazes could and did sprout from the import of new foreign textiles, for instance, and a government like that of Venice could see a quick profit from a sumptuary tax based on a specific item or other. Sumptuary laws and fines, as well were often leveled against certain groups or classes in order to enable differentiation by sight and show distinctions in the social order.
Today in the west we don't have sumptuary laws. The word 'sumptuary', as I write this, is even unrecognized by the spell checker. It suggests, 'statuary'. The word 'sumptuous' is common enough as an adjective, but is just another descriptive for 'plentiful' or 'rich'. Perhaps as in a sumptuous banquet. I wonder if this word isn't used commonly today because people don't talk about class and differences between class. It used to be very important. But today, for at least a generation, t-shirts and jeans are the everyday wear of everyone. Even in public. That's what Mitt Romney was wearing in that video last year during the presidential campaign when he was pouring laundry soap into a washer. Showing he could be a regular guy, even if that was a collared shirt he was wearing. Definitely dressing down.
When Hollywood celebrities appear on the red carpet before an award ceremony, for example, for the cameras, they will often tell you: the gowns, the jewelery, the suits, shoes are all rented. Usually. Nobody really wears that stuff, but I'm sure they can pay a high price for what they do wear. In the days of the Italian Renaissance, ways were found to demostrate someone's working status or their personal power and authority, in other ways. A color in a cape or hood, a simple pin, the color of a bag, the sort of hat worn, the kind of horse you rode, the size of the retinue that kept up, all could signify various placement. As economics or laws changed, so did tastes and what could be allowed or forbidden.
The Editors of Marin Sanudo's diaries for English tell us that sometimes laws were enacted "... in an effort to keep wealth from being taken out of circulation through such expenditures." A law was pased in 1511, they tell us, that repeated many prohibitions first set down decades before, despite their apparent ineffectiveness. Enforcement seemed a big problem. [p. 305]
And women continued to ignore these laws.
Sanudo Diaries: May 8, 1529 (50:305): "Many laws have been enacted at many times by this council concerning the clothing styles of the men and women and boys and girls of this city, as may be seen by the contents of those laws. The wearing of chains and pearls having been forbidden as a way of avoiding excessive expense, it appears that the women of this city with new ingenuity have devised a substitute for chains of gold and pearls. They wear chains, belts, and necklaces and such like decorated with alabaster, crystal, lapis lazuli, carnelian, green quartz, mother-of-pearl, quartz, jasper, agates, porcelain, rock crystal, and every other kind of pastiche and, similarly, embroidery and filigree. People pay thirty, forty, fifty, and one hundred ducats for such things, and yet their resale value is barely four to six ducats or even less, which causes terrible damage and loss to this glorious city and is completely contrary to the holy intentions of this most illustrious Senate. Therefore:
There will be a new law that all of the additional aforementioned women's ornaments will be completely prohibited, and they may neither be made nor worn. But because it is fitting that women wear something around their necks, which will be of little expense and harm, the recent proclamation of this body notwithstanding, they are permitted to wear around the neck and on no other part of the body one gold chain or small gold chain worth forty ducats or less, including the expense for manufacturing it, which cannot exceed five ducats. No other ornament may be worn but the chain or small chain of the value described above. These chains or small chains may not be worn until they have been stamped by our sumptuary office; by law this stamp will be given without any emolument whatsoever; transgressors will be condemned to whatever penalty the sumptuary office will decide upon. Additionally, no woman may use as a belt any object ornamented with more than handiwork made with woven silk."
Editor's note: "For all its determinations, this was not to be the last sumptuary law. Luxurious dress and objects continued to circulate and be esteemed by those who could afford them, a group not limited to the patrician class. Pagar le pompe, "paying the sumptuary fines," became so proverbial an expression that it has been suggested that such laws and fines were intended as a form of supplementary taxation on wealth, with those able to afford the tax entitled to display their luxurious possessions." [p. 308-9]
Listed in a footnote here, is a reference to a 2000 article by Jane Bridgeman," "Pagar le pompe": why quattrocento sumptuary laws did not work." In Women In Italian Renaissance culture and society, ed. Letizia Panizza, 209-26. Oxford: Legenda, European Humanities Research Center, University of Oxford.
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All quotes as Sanudo Diaries or Editor's notes or Editor's Footnotes from Venice, Cita Excellentissima, Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo translated by Linda L Carroll, editors: Patricia H LaBalme and Laura Sanguineti White, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
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